The Apprentice Parent Guide

New York City in the 1970s is suffering from urban blight. Middle class residents have fled to the suburbs, the tax base is shrinking, and fabled buildings are falling into disrepair. But Donald J. Trump (Sebastian Stan) has a dream. He wants to buy the decaying Commodore Hotel, refurbish it, and gentrify the area around the Grand Central Terminal. There’s one big problem: before he can get financial backing for this scheme, he needs to make a nasty lawsuit go away.

In 1973, the federal government sued Fred and Donald Trump for trying to minimize the number of black tenants at their housing developments. In desperation, Donald Trump turns to a lawyer he has recently met, a sharp-eyed hatchet man and confidante to Richard Nixon, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).

Sensing potential in the wannabe property magnate, Cohn not only makes the lawsuit disappear, he appoints himself Trump’s mentor. And he gives Trump his three rules for success: First, never retreat. Always attack, attack, attack. Second, deny everything and admit nothing. (After all, truth is relative and all that matters is winning, says Roy.) And, third, never admit defeat. Insist you won and refuse to say otherwise. With those rules ringing in his ears, Donald Trump sets off to conquer Manhattan’s property market.

It’s impossible to depict Donald Trump’s entire life in a two-hour film, and director Ali Abbasi wisely doesn’t try. Instead, he focuses on how the relationship between Trump and Cohn shapes the young tycoon until Cohn’s death in 1986. There’s a near-Shakespearean tragedy here: an ambitious, somewhat naïve man achieves his monumental dreams and plays a role in restoring his city to greatness, but along the way, he becomes corrupted by his mentor, absorbing his cynicism and shadowing his own life.

While fervent Trump supporters will object to any non-complimentary portrayals of their candidate and ardent never-Trumpers might complain that the movie glosses over Trump’s racism, bankruptcies, and tawdry divorces, I think Abbasi struck a middle road. Instead of getting into the messy world of politics, Abbasi focuses his lens on the slightly less cut-throat world of business, and how that shaped the Donald Trump we see today. Given that Trump has always been happy to talk about his business success, and the reams of contemporaneous information available in books, interviews, court filings, and TV segments, it’s not hard for Abbasi to back up his script.

I do wish that Abbasi put some effort into cleaning up that script: it has some of the most explicit sexual content I’ve ever seen in a film. The movie contains a gay nude sex scene (plus a gay threesome), a nude sex scene with visible breasts, an adulterous oral sex scene involving full frontal female nudity, and a scene of marital rape (attested to by Ivana Trump in divorce proceedings and later walked back as a feeling of “violation”). There’s also a party where women are dancing around topless. Throw in plentiful alcohol consumption, brief smoking, frequent methamphetamine use, and people snorting cocaine, and the 70+ profanities feel superfluous. This is a film where the negative content is so egregious that I can’t recommend it to viewers of any age, no matter how interested they might be in exploring Trump’s backstory.

And that’s a shame. Donald Trump is a perplexing figure, a creature of his time and place. Sebastian Stan inhabits the role, giving us an ambitious striver, who lacks introspection but whose resilience and irrepressible optimism allow him to keep going full throttle to triumph or disaster. Jeremy Strong’s Roy Cohn is positively reptilian – cold, dead-eyed, and utterly without conscience. It’s a frightening film that leaves the audience with many questions, of which “What if?” is sure to predominate.